Stephen C. Meyer

On today’s ID the Future, radio host Michael Medved sits down with Cambridge-trained philosopher of science Stephen Meyer to hear some exciting news about the newly active James Webb space telescope, a telescope dramatically more powerful than the already extraordinarily powerful Hubble space telescope. The James Webb telescope was launched by NASA last Christmas and has begun returning a stream of dramatic images. As Meyer explains, thanks to Webb we can now see farther into the distant universe than ever before, and the farther a telescope can see, the further into the past it can see. The James Webb telescope can see far enough to witness galaxies from the very early universe. Meyer says what Webb is revealing, and what astronomers and physicists have uncovered in the past several decades, point ever more insistently away from atheism and toward theism. For more on the topic, check out Meyer’s recent essay in Newsweek, “How Science Stopped Backing Atheists and Started Pointing Back to God.” Image: Jupiter through James Webb Space Telescope, from NASA, CC 2.0

On today’s ID the Future, radio host Michael Medved sits down with bestselling science author Stephen Meyer to discuss the Marvel movie Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Medved isn’t wild about the film, but he uses it as a springboard to dive into what he calls “the madness of the multiverse”—namely, the proposals in physics and cosmology for the idea that our universe is just one of many universes. Meyer explains some of the early motivations among twentieth-century physicists and cosmologists for proposing a multiverse. Then he turns to what he says is the main driver for interest in the multiverse in our day—a desire to explain away something that is deeply puzzling on the grounds of atheism, namely that the laws and constants of physics and chemistry are exquisitely fine tuned for life. For the atheist, fine tuning smells too much like intelligent design, and on a cosmic scale. The solution from the atheists: there are countless universes, they suggest, maybe even an infinity of them, and our universe is just one of the lucky ones with the right laws and constants to allow for life. In essence, we won a multiverse cosmic lottery. Meyer’s recent book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, lists multiple problems with this explanation. The book is available at Amazon and major bookstores. Here in his conversation with Medved, Meyer begins to unpack his case. One problem is that these postulated universes are unobservable and that even indirect evidence for them is weak to non-existent. But Meyer cites a more fundamental problem: a multiverse, it’s broadly agreed, would require a multiverse-generating device, and it’s now clear that it would have to be exquisitely fine tuned to generate even one habitable universe. So the multiverse theory doesn’t remove the need for a fine tuner. It merely moves the need back a step. Meyer says the fine tuning of the cosmos is better explained by reference to the one type of cause that in our experience is able to look ahead and fine tune multiple components to achieve a goal—intelligent agency. Image courtesy of Marvel Studios

On today’s ID the Future Return of the God Hypothesis author Stephen Meyer and radio host Michael Medved discuss some hit videos featuring Meyer that explore the increasingly strong scientific case for intelligent design and for the idea that the universe is the product of a transcendent mind. In their discussion, Meyer and Medved focus on how evidence of a cosmic beginning supports Judeo-Christian theism, and how the Judeo-Christian faith undergirded the birth of science. The Stephen Meyer videos that Medved spotlights now have more than 10 million views altogether. You can find them all here.